Validity
Khoisan was proposed as one of the four families of African languages in Greenberg's classification (1949–1954, revised in 1963). However, few linguists who now study Khoisan languages accept their unity, and the name "Khoisan" is used by them as a term of convenience without any implication of linguistic validity, much as "Papuan" and "Australian" are. It has been suggested that the similarities of the Tuu and Kx'a families are due to a southern African Sprachbund rather than a genealogical relationship, whereas the Khoe (or perhaps Kwadi–Khoe) family is a more recent migrant to the area, and may be related to Sandawe in East Africa.
E.O.J. Westphal is known for his early rejection of the Khoisan language family (Starostin 2003). Bonny Sands (1998) concluded that the family is not demonstrable with current evidence. Anthony Traill at first accepted Khoisan (Traill 1986), but by 1998 concluded that it could not be demonstrated with current data and methods, rejecting it as based on a single-criterion typology: the presence of clicks. Dimmendaal (2008) summarized the general view with, "it has to be concluded that Greenberg’s intuitions on the genetic unity of Khoisan could not be confirmed by subsequent research. Today, the few scholars working on these languages treat the three as independent language families that cannot or can no longer be shown to be genetically related" (p. 841).
Not all linguists are convinced by the rejection of Greenberg's classification. Prominent defenders of Khoisan include Christopher Ehret (1986, 2003), Henry Honken (1988, 1998), and George Starostin (2003, 2008). According to Ehret (2002: 58):
The issue of whether the Khoisan languages can be demonstrated to belong to a single family remains contentious. I take the view that we will eventually be able to demonstrate this relationship in a satisfactory manner. The languages attributed to the Khoisan family share a number of similar deep features of structure and phonology, many unique to them, as well as more basic vocabulary words than is often recognized to be the case.Read more about this topic: Khoisan Languages
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